Supercompting in Pakistan

[CrashBandicoot]

Go back 10 years or so,and super computers were found locked up in some heavily guarded CIA maximum security Lab.The US government had hard and fast rules to curb the export of any components useful for building a super computer,and only the frienly nations were allowed top have the harware.Rogue nations like Pakistan have always been in the exclusion list. Now with the advancement of technology,supercomputers have become more and more common. Many universities and public institutins have succesfully built supercomputers from off the shelf components without any purpose built hardware.
With the GPU paching much more computational power than the common CPU,now many researchers are turning towards GPU for the next generatin High performance computing.
Here is one example where some dudes in Holland bought some gtx 295 and built a super computer.A desktop supercomputer. http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2009/12/15/astra-builds-13-gpu-supercomputer/1

Both NVIDIA and ATI had been working on this concept and encouraging amature programers to download their development kits and come up with some thing useful. NVIDIA has their tesla series cards and CUDA "thing",and ATI has their ATI stream "thing" . Both CUDA and ATI stream are free to download and developers can fiddle around http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_computing_solutions.html

http://developer.amd.com/gpu/atistreamsdk/pages/default.aspx

The question is,can we do it? The hardware is abundantly available.Specially ATI's 5870 graphics cards are packed with computing power upto 2.5 terra flops,and thats huge.The problem lies in harnessing this power via software.The softwares either dont exist or are very unstable at the moment.
The ATI and NVIDIA developers kits are all in C++,and there are many C++ programmers in Pakistan.Why not give it a go? May be one of our programmers develop the operating system required to convert a GPU into a super computer.

There are many profitable businesses operating on the basis of super computing in neighboring india,here is one example http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...allyas-Formula-1-cars/articleshow/5401413.cms

Other uses are material testing,weather forecast,medical imaging,defence and of course media editing,CAD and engineering designing.
There are many new softwares cominh in the market using GPU one example is http://www.insidepro.com/eng/egb.shtml , this uses CUDA to find lost passwords.A Ms Word,Excel password finder http://lastbit.com/gpu.asp Here is another software which uses both NVIDIA dn ATI cards for cracking the wireless router WEP keys,you may be able to use someone else's broadband http://www.elcomsoft.com/ewsa.html. Many companies such as Nero,cyberlink and others are churning out ATI stream and CUDA softwares for general consumers. http://www.nero.com/eng/moveit-nvidia-cuda.html
http://www.cyberlink.com/prog/compan...nt.do?pid=2158. Another fun software from nvidia is http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multime...A-Gelato.shtml. You can create your own animated movied using this software and NVIDIA card.
If someone got the right software,there are buyers.For example,this http://upload.cnet.com/?tag=ftr is a mighty good,and well known plateform to promote your software if you got one.

So there is a market,and GPU computing seems to be the way forward. With most of us on this forum being th eowners of NVIDIA or ATI GPUs,if we set aside some time for looking into CUDA and ATI stream,one of us may pioneer the first supercomputing private business in Pakistan.Difficult but not impossible.

Further reading http://gpgpu.org/

 

[Rapchik Killer]

hmm, its in the articles section so ill try to think of it as an article and tell you imo what are the few things you should work on when writing articles.. firstly, add up the link to texts, like you mention cuda then hyperlink the text 'cuda' that makes it look better.. secondly try formatting the overall article a bit more.. thirdly, try and make it as informative as possible, so google around and search a bit before writing one.. lastly, its never good to write terms suchs as 'things' which you used for cuda 'thing' and stream 'thing', this comes in the informative point.. you should never let the reader feel that you are lacking information at any point.. this is just a little constructive criticism which i hope you dont mind and take it as a positive way to self improve..

Now the topic you are touching is a very good one indeed, but super computers are basically simple computers but instead of working on multiple tasks they are given single very complex tasks, which require very high amounts of processing power.. now as very few people here work in such places where such machines are needed thats why they are not so obvious, and their works are more hidden from the general public.. but im pretty sure we must have some skilled people using gpus and cpus to run some complex task somewhere..

 

[CrashBandicoot]

Thanks for the positive criticism,no i didnt mind that.But since i am new on this forum,writing this article and fitting it in the appropriate section of the website was no easy task.
The purpose of writing all this was to draw the attention of the readers towards a bit of relatively simple programming which can be done from a normal desktop,and for which all the hardware and software development kits are readily available from ATI and NVIDIA. If someone on here with C++ programming skills digs into CUDA and ATI stream,may be they can come up with some interesting results.
Is there a need of supercomputing in Pakistan? Why we have to give all the oil and gas exploration contracts to foreign companies? Because we dont have the technology? and oil exploration is the worlds biggest user of supercomputing. We simply dont have the people ambitious enough to develop the technology locally and then start a profitable busines of oil exploration.
We got the brains,we havent got the right directions. If a few ATI card owners decide to look into ATI stream for an hour a day,or a few NVIDIA card owners dedicate an hour a day to look into CUDA developers kit,something big might happen in our country.

 

[watch]

Very good Ideas.But again as you yourself pointed out.We have the talent but lack direction.And also yeah

there are many high end GPU owners here on this forum.Maybe they could look into this matter.But then

lack of direction and incentive is there.Ok suppose some people here in pakisan team up and research into

this and succeed in making it.then what they don't see any direction in which they can cash up their work.

oil exploration there is little of it in pakistan and it is in the hands of foreigners.The link you gave for INDIA.

There supercomputer is developed by the Famous TATA and they have a huge financial backing.And the truth

is we don't have many uses for supercomputer in pakistan.Because in my opinion commercial uses of super

computer require industry.and there is no industry in Pakistan.

 

[Deamonillidan]

Nice ideas but there is no such need of supercomputer's in Pakistan right now.

 

[CrashBandicoot]

Actually we are so content on our reliance on everything foreign that we really dont feel the need to move forward and get ourselves some technological advancements. In that context you are right,there is no need of any computing in Pakistan,we can keep relying on on our foreign lords.

 

[watch]

Sir you are right but there are no serious uses of supercomputer in PK aside from what you mentioned in one of your posts are they rely on professional enormously fast computers not start ups.Pls tell me some uses of super computers in Pakistan.

 

[eViLrAcEr]

the only use of supercomputers is in research facilities where it is being already used (in Pakistan) facilities like PINSTECH

There are supercomputers in Pakistan. There are some in educational institutes like NUST, there are also supercomputers present within Atomic Energy and related research institutes. Throughout the nuclear history of Pakistan, we have been using supercomputers. Also, oil and gas and geological survey companies have also been using these supercomputers. Now the supercomputer of yesteryears is less powerful than alot of desktop computers of today. I guess with the advent of parallel processing, anyone can build with supercomputers.

 

[CrashBandicoot]

I may have given a wrong or bad theme and title to the article,but it snot only about supercomputing.Its about high performance computing on GPU,and there is a market.For example conversion of large media files is a very time consuming process for CPU.A 2gb movie file conversion to full HD takes ages,but the same can be done much more efficiently on GPU based software such as badaboom http://www.badaboomit.com/


Other uses are material testing,weather forecast,medical imaging,defence and of course media editing,CAD and engineering designing.
There are many new softwares cominh in the market using GPU one example is http://www.insidepro.com/eng/egb.shtml , this uses CUDA to find lost passwords.A Ms Word,Excel password finder http://lastbit.com/gpu.asp Here is another software which uses both NVIDIA dn ATI cards for cracking the wireless router WEP keys,you may be able to use someone else's broadband http://www.elcomsoft.com/ewsa.html. Many companies such as Nero,cyberlink and others are churning out ATI stream and CUDA softwares for general consumers. http://www.nero.com/eng/moveit-nvidia-cuda.html
http://www.cyberlink.com/prog/company/press-news-content.do?pid=2158. Another fun software from nvidia is http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Graphic/Graphic-Editors/NVIDIA-Gelato.shtml. You can create your own animated movied using this software and NVIDIA card.
If someone got the right software,there are buyers.For example,this http://upload.cnet.com/?tag=ftr is a mighty good,and well known plateform to promote your software if you got one.

 

[herpderp]

Won't say much but all I know is that the computing resources at NUST are nothing but a shiny white elephant to attract funding from foreign research institutes. I doubt if they ever even benchmarked those machines, they are fairly outdated by now. One possible way of utilizing these computational resources is to get a high speed interconnect and get it on the grid, and start renting the computing resources to other research labs.

 

[Nauman 360]

i bet it still won't run crysis on high settings